From Edwin Johnston on NYC Indymedia:

Without any notice to WBAI manager Tony Riddle, nor to the governing board of the Pacifica Foundation, the interim executive director, Grace Aaron of Los Angeles, has conspired with some of her appointees to take control of WBAI in an undemocratic process. Here is a link to a reposted statement from Grace Aaron of her super-secret plan to take control of WBAI in NYC. This statement was reposted by Joe Wanzala of Berkeley, the vice chair of the Pacifica governing board. Earlier in the day, WBAI manager Tony Riddle sent out an e-mail to his staff making it known that Grace Aaron had directed the locks to be changed at the transmitter without informing him of any of this. During the day various programmers at WBAI began bringing this coup d'etat to light and members of the WBAI local and national board who are supportive of the coup are calling for those programmers who went on the air to complain to be fired and removed from their positions. All Pacifica stations and affiliates need to open their phone lines for a complete dialogue with listeners to get through this treacherous period.

Groban, Marsalis, press Congress for arts funding

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Philip Seymour Hoffman and Kenneth Branagh star in this movie coming out Aug. 28 about the UK offshore pirate radio operators. From the film's web site:

Celebrated filmmaker Richard Curtis (Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary, Love Actually) brings audiences his most personal comedy to date. Writing and directing the story of a band of rogue deejays who captivated British radio listeners in the ’60s, playing the music that defined a generation and standing up to a government that, incomprehensibly, preferred jazz, Curtis welcomes us aboard "The Boat That Rocked."

Leading the cast of the new film are Academy Award® winner Philip Seymour Hoffman as Radio Rock’s infamous deejay The Count; Bill Nighy as the station’s owner (and ship’s captain), Quentin; Rhys Ifans as mystic deejay royalty Gavin; Nick Frost as the amorous, sarcastic disc jockey Dave; and Kenneth Branagh as the man out to shut down Radio Rock, Minister Dormandy.

Internet Radio is a Serious Threat to Sirius Radio

Clearwire Transforms Wi-Fi Devices with the CLEAR(TM) Spot Personal Hotspot Accessory

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Billion Dollar Charlie takes on the RIAA

EMI slaps the "idiot-tax" on free music

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Fourth-generation knockdown! WiMax vs LTE arstechnica

Sirius Streaming Radio Not Working For Some Customers consummerist

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Computer use has replaced radio as the No. 2 media activity. Radio is now No. 3.

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http://www.mudhalfm.com

São Paulo radio station teaches old media new tricks CNN

AT&T, Comcast Onboard With RIAA Anti-Piracy Program Billboard

AT&T first to test RIAA antipiracy plan cnet

AT&T exec: ISP will never terminate service on RIAA's word cnet

Hottest tracks to cost $1.29 at iTunes starting April 7 latimes

From Cory Doctorow in Boing Boing:

A new bill before Congress calls on the NTIA and FCC to inventory the spectrum use in America. Previous work on this by the likes of the New America Foundation found that the vast majority of US broadcast spectrum was sitting fallow -- either squatted on by members of the National Association of Broadcasters (who get their spectrum for free but are theoretically required to put programming in it and use it in the public interest) or reserved from allocation to keep from interfering with licensed users (many of whom were not using their spectrum at all).

Three tiny slices of open spectrum, at 900Mhz, 2.5Ghz and 5.7Ghz, have created a massive economic and technological revolution through WiFi and other unlicensed uses of the public airwaves. The potential for new economic and technological gains from more open spectrum is unimaginable. Getting that spectrum into use is damned good policy, and long overdue.

My only concern is that the FCC will look for short-term cash gains by auctioning off all or most of the fallow spectrum for exclusive use, as has been done with 3G licenses. But this short-sighted approach trades the immediate gains from an auction for the perpetual income stream that arises from the commerce and activity that's enabled by open spectrum. Think, for example, of the total economic benefits that the nation and the world have derived from WiFi -- from cards and base-stations to hotspots to all the gains in efficiency and new opportunities created by wireless networking, and compare this to the paltry sums extracted by a few phone companies selling crippled, metered, filtered 3G network access.

The bill, titled the Radio Spectrum Inventory Act, was introduced last week by John Kerry (D-MA), Olympia Snowe (R-ME), Bill Nelson (D-FL), and Roger Wicker (R-MS). It amends part of the Communications Act by adding a requirement for a national survey of what's being broadcast into our radio airwaves. The survey will cover everything from 200MHz to 3.5GHz, and will be run by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration and the Federal Communications Commission, with input as needed from the Office of Science and Technology.

New bill calls for inventory of US spectrum.

Decision Due April 2. What’s it going to be, Bunky? RBR

Sprint announces Next U.S. Markets to Experience Sprint 4G

WBEB-FM, a top tier Adult Contemporary station, took down its Internet stream

Last.fm Flips To Fee Model Outside US, UK, Germany

IM Is Coming To MySpace Hypebot

Comcast, Cox join RIAA antipiracy campaign cnet

Cadillac rolls out in-car Internet access cnet

Apple and AT&T Sued (again) Over 3G Speed DailyWireless

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SXSW: Should Radio Stations Pay Recording Artists? wired

Turn a Vintage Radio into a Wi-Fi Internet Radio lifehacker

From Michael Leddy in Orange Crate Art:

You may listen to a radio station daily, but do you know what its call letters really mean? If not, try Call Letter Origins. Charming and no doubt occasionally fanciful bits of lore abound therein.

Some of my favorites:
CFLC: "Canada's Finest Little Community" (Brockville, Ontario).
KAND: Wolf Brand Canned Chili (Corsicana, Texas).
WLBB: "We Love Butter Beans" (Carrollton, Georgia). A Judge Tisinger, the station's first owner, liked his beans.
WMBD: "World's Most Beautiful Drive" (Peoria, Illinois). That drive would be Peoria's Grandview Drive.
WPLJ: "White Port and Lemon Juice" (New York, New York). I know that one from the Mothers of Invention recording of "WPLJ."

I'm surprised to learn that New York's WMCA (home of the Good Guys of my musical youth) is named for the Hotel McAplin, the station's first home. And New York's WOR? "World of Radio." These stations all survive (CFLC as CFJR), most of them programming the syndicated stuff one can hear up and down the dial. (What dial?)

A future in which free internet radio services are ubiquitous in cars and cellphones CNN

Comcast: Mobile WiMAX this Summer in Portland Daily Wireless

SXSWi's party scene goes do-it-yourself cnet

Latest Pandora Pairing: Vudu Set Top Box... Digital Music News

How To Pretend You're At SXSW Hypebot

ABC Radio Networks and Radiolicious have signed an agreement for streaming over smartphones. RadioInk

Corgan testisfies for Performance Rights Act SunTimes

An iPod So Small Its Controls Are Found on the Cord NYTimes

SLACKER LAUNCHES SXSW CHANNEL

Connect to the WiFi while you're @ SXSW

Sound designers and sound artists are often asked to create realistic sonic environments for places that they've never experienced. This requires some serious shapeshifting and mindbending skills. For this month's Giant Ear))) we would like to celebrate these skills by requesting the truly fantastical. Please send in: (Option 1) A piece composed for a place that you may never be able to go to physically as a person. Altering the sound to convince listeners of the place is encouraged. Or (Option 2) Send in a recording/composition of yourself actually in an actual fantastic place. Fantastic! Please send your field-recording based work as an MP3 (via e-mail, FTP or www.sendspace.com) to Andrea Williams at lemurz66@yahoo.com By April 2, 2009. "Fantastic Places," hosted by Andrea Williams and Edmund Mooney, will be webcast on free103point9 Online Radio 7-9 p.m. in April on Sunday (date TBA). Giant Ear))) is the New York Society for Acoustic Ecology's weekly, two-hour radio show webcasting recordings of the NYC soundscape, (wo)man-on-the-street public interest interviews, live on-site sound explorations, special guests, and more. New show updated each month, show airs weekly Sundays at 7 p.m.

The radio stunt with the worst outcome since the staff at WKRP tossed turkeys out the window to celebrate Thanksgiving in Cincinnati:

From Carol Slezak in the Chicago Sun-Times:

The goal was for ESPN 1000 to help Hawthorne Race Course celebrate 100 years of Carey family ownership. Nothing wrong with that. But then two hosts of the station's ''Afternoon Saloon'' show agreed to act like jockeys and race thoroughbreds. Bad idea. After falling from his horse twice Friday, one of the hosts spent the weekend in an intensive-care unit with bleeding on his brain. Talk about a promotional stunt gone wrong.

''I'm banged up, bruised and dizzy,'' Harry Teinowitz said Monday. ''My short-term memory is shot, and I have a crappy week [of healing] ahead of me. But I consider myself lucky.''

The first time Teinowitz fell, he was still in the paddock. The guy who was helping him mount the horse noticed that he was a tad heftier than your average jockey and overcompensated, throwing him over the horse. Teinowitz landed flat on his face.

At that point he probably should have backed out of the stunt. Instead, he remounted and proceeded to race his radio partner John Jurkovic in a one-sixteenth-mile sprint. (Carmen DeFalco, the show's other host, had the good sense to decline the offer to race.) Teinowitz beat Jurkovic, but after crossing the finish line, he couldn't get his horse to slow down.

''I kept yelling, 'Stop, stop, stop,''' Teinowitz said. ''But he wasn't listening. Then he started going straight into a fence. I thought he was going to throw me onto Laramie Avenue, so I started to get off him. The next thing I remember, a medic was shining a light in my face. How dumb am I?''

Harry Fox To Deliver Payments May 15 (beware radio "archivers") Billboard

Podcast Listeners Outperform Students Who Attend The Lecture

Communities are the radio stars in the UK Ofcom.com

Music can take the pain away, study finds nowpublic.com

Facebook Sending More Traffic Than Google to Some Sites Adage

Police Bust Alleged Gang-Promoting Radio Station MSNBC

David Byrne's Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists — and Megastars Wired

Big Music Will Surrender, But Not Until At Least 2011 TechCrunch

Nielsen: Social Nets Overtake E-mail Billboard

Major Nokia Music Announcement Wednesday

I am surprised Boing Boing and other media outlets are taking the police at their word, when they have lied so many times in the past about stories like this. Where is the link to the station's web site? Where is proof of any kind?

From Mark Frauenfelder in Boing Boing:
On Saturday the Federal Communications Commission and the Orange County Sheriff's department raided a pirate radio station called "Street Heat" that ran ads for gangs and provided information on where to get drugs and prostitutes.

Police said 20-year-old Balthazard Senat's pirate radio station had illegally tapped into 91.3 FM. DJs behind the microphone had their own rules and regulations as they broadcasted from a bedroom at a home on 30th Street off South Orange Blossom Trail. The radio station's "Street Heat" broadcast could be heard anywhere in Orange County. Police said Senat had been cursing and using derogatory language on the air for about three months.

Soundwalkers from Raquel Castro on Vimeo.
This film by Raquel Castro includes interviews with free103point9 transmission artists Michelle Nagai and Tom Roe, as well as Executive Director Galen Joseph-Hunter, and many other terrific sound artists. The description:

There are some fundamental principles regarding the construction of an acoustically healthy society, one where we can exist within the sounds of life. Respect towards voice and words, sonic awareness, the awakening of the sense of hearing. To preserve the sounds that tend to fade out, while remaining open to the sounds that spring out of each technological stride. To build an aural idiom that interprets its own symbolism. To accept the silence, enforcing it in the due moments. And, above all else, to listen.

Beleaguered Radio Industry Faces Rocky Path Ahead Billboard

Pitchfork.tv Teams Up With NPR Music Pitchfork

Free Wi-Fi Won't Kill Sirius XM Fool.com

The Music Industry's New Internet Problem Businessweek.com

Clearwire Confirms Launch of Additional Markets Wimax.com